Musical.ly was a social media platform focused on the creation of short-form lip-synch, dance, and comedy videos. It was quite popular in the mid-2010s.
TikTok is a social media platform that originally focused on short-form lip-synch, dance, and comedy videos. It became even more popular than Musical.ly in the late 2010s.
That’s not a coincidence.
The Switch From Musical.ly to TikTok
In November 2017, the Chinese company ByteDance spent nearly $1 billion to acquire the Chinese company that owned Musical.ly. ByteDance owned a similar platform, Douyin, which was only available to users in China. It had also recently created TikTok, which was initially visualized as an international version of Douyin but was languishing in Western markets.
After the acquisition, ByteDance promised that TikTok and Musical.ly would operate separately.
But on August 2, 2018, not even a year later, the two apps were merged. ByteDance concluded that it made more sense to combine the Douyin technology used to run TikTok with Musical.ly’s user base (more than 200 million) and flourishing partnerships with major record labels and broadcast networks, than it did for the two platforms to compete.
The transition was a smooth one. Musical.ly’s content and users were migrated to TikTok without any service interruption. Some of Musical.ly’s most popular features, like personal video feeds, trending video and song charts, and editing techniques like filters (which had never before been available on apps), were added to TikTok as well.
The new TikTok was a hit. The app became the #1 download in the U.S. by the end of the year, and TikTok had almost quadrupled the size of Musical.ly’s worldwide user base two years after the merger. Meanwhile, Douyin continued to dominate the Chinese market.
What Happened After the Merger
The two founders of Musical.ly, Alex Zhu and Lulu Yang (both now very rich), stayed with the company after the merger. Yang left in 2022, while Zhu is still with ByteDance. Musical.ly shut down, of course, but it left a legacy that TikTok has refined and expanded, now as the fifth-largest social app in the world with nearly two billion users.
About the Author
Peter Hasselworth is a contributor at iDigic, sharing valuable insights about Instagram growth and social media marketing strategies.